Sergei Parajanov is a name that should either immediately evoke some kind of profound emotion, or be entirely unfamiliar, depending on how much exposure one has had to his work. There are a few of his films that have entered into the general consciousness (one of which will be discussed a bit later in this piece), but in general, he’s a filmmaker that hasn’t received much in terms of recognition, beyond the small but loyal group of devotees, who have dedicated much of their time to keeping the legacy of this masterful artist alive. No one made films quite like Parajanov, whose refusal to abide by conventions or follow any known rule of filmmaking (or is it best described as visual storytelling?) made him one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of cinema, and someone whose career has always been ripe for rediscovery, especially by audiences who may be unaware of the impact he had, whether directly or by mere proxy, on so much of filmmaking since he began making films. There has never been a bad time to talk about Parajanov but now is a particularly opportune moment to discuss his work, as it is the thirtieth anniversary of passing. In order to commemorate his incredible legacy, this piece has been written in collaboration with my good friend, Andre Ferreira, who also professes to have been touched by the director’s work. Together, we hope to outline the many aspects of Parajanov’s work that have made him such an enduring presence in the lives of many viewers who have been captivated by his unique style, as well as looking at his own life and career, and how his experiences played a pivotal part in how he realized these absurdly beautiful works of art that changed cinema in their own special way.
It is not merely through his directorial achievements that Parajanov entered into the pantheon of legendary directors. In many ways, the story of his life is as extraordinary as any of his fantastic visions, and his imaginative and personal struggles against a repressive state seem impossible to entangle from the almost insurmountable challenges faced by his protagonists. Born in Georgia to Armenian parents, Parajanov enrolled in the prestigious VGIK film school in 1945, where he was instructed by no less a filmmaking luminary than Aleksandr Dovzhenko. By 1948, he had already been imprisoned for homosexual acts (which his relatives maintain were fabricated by the authorities in response to Parajanov’s dissident political views). His suffering was further compounded when his first wife, a Muslim Tartar who converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity for his sake, was murdered by relatives in retaliation for her conversion.
Although he worked in various genres ranging from documentaries to fairy tales and propagandistic war epics throughout the ’50s and early ’60s, the bulk of his reputation comes from four extraordinary films he made from between 1964 and 1988 (Parajanov himself disowned his early work). Inspired by his twin idols of Andrei Tarkovsky and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Parajanov sought to create a new style out of whole cloth, driven as equally by his ethnographic and spiritual interests in the satellite countries largely repressed and forgotten by a Moscow-centric USSR, as they were by his defiantly anti-realist imagination. Fusing painting, poetry, dance and folklore, they brazenly ignored the politically sanctioned social realist style endorsed by the authorities-and not without consequences.
While 1964’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was released to international acclaim with relative freedom (even its original Ukrainian soundtrack was maintained), The Color of Pomegranates – the work for he is most renowned – was drastically recut and dubbed into Russian, ostensibly for the lack of educational value, though it is more likely that the film’s embrace of Armenian culture and religious symbolism threatened the status quo of a strictly Russian Communist regime. The heavy hand of Soviet oppression struck a crucial blow in 1973, when it sentenced Parajanov to five years in a Siberian labour camp for the alleged rape of a Communist party member. Despite the support of the international artistic community (ranging from Yves Saint-Laurent to John Updike), Parajanov served four years of his sentence. Under strict surveillance, he was forbidden from carrying on working in the cinema, instead turning his attention to other artistic pursuits, in 1983, he was jailed for bribery. Although the sentence lasted only a year, it placed a massive strain on his health, and despite triumphantly completing two more films, he would succumb to cancer in 1990, aged only 66. Upon his death, a group of prominent Italian filmmakers sent a telegram to Moscow. It read simply: “The world has lost a magician”.
Therefore, this piece has many functions – an overview of his career for anyone looking for a place to start with his films, an analysis of some of the stylistic and narrative idiosyncrasies that set him apart from nearly every other filmmaker in history, and most importantly, a tribute to one of the most important filmmakers to ever work in the medium, an artist whose fierce determination in realizing his own unique vision immediately sets him apart from every other director one can name. There’s a tendency for tributes to attempt to cover everything about a particular artist, especially when dealing with someone who is isn’t as omnipotent in discussions beyond a smaller group of admirers. Unfortunately, covering every aspect of his life and career is impossible, and would be far too long to feasibly put together (and as we can see from his films, no one valued brevity more than Parajanov). In this regard, we’ve chosen a relatively simple approach, which is to take our cue from the man himself, who once stated, when asked about his inspirations as a filmmaker:
“Directing is basically the truth, transformed into images. Sorrow, hope, love, beauty”.
Throughout this retrospective, we’ll be looking at each of these four components that Parajanov indicates as being essential to the filmmaking process from his perspective to the point where we can see them represented in all of his films. In order to accomplish that, we’ll be considering four of his most famous films, each one associated to one of these themes. By no means a comprehensive history of his career, or the multitudes of themes and intricacies that define his work, this is instead just a glimpse into the endless genius of Sergei Parajanov.
Sorrow – Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965)
Starting with the earliest film in this retrospective seems important, not only because it gives us an introduction into the world of Parajanov, but because it allows us to explore the first of the four themes he professed to use as his guiding principles in making a film. Moreover, the theme of “sorrow” is, on the surface, the most downbeat of the four, since it stands out as being inherently more negative than the rest. However, when looking at it through the lens of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Тіні забутих предків), we can see how the director so masterfully turns heartwrenching despair into some of the most gorgeous cultural commentary ever committed to film. The story of a close-knit Ukrainian community struggling to retain their traditions due to the winds of change blowing throughout their region, as a result of the growing need for progression that took place in the nineteenth century, it is brimming with vigorous depth, which comes through how Parajanov employs a kind of melancholic sorrow, not only to show their despair and how the plight of these individuals may be cause for the erosion of their roots, but also as fertile ground for an in-depth exploration of what it is they’re so intent on holding onto.
The most lucid of his works, and the one that is driven more by the narrative than the visual splendour which he’d subsequently go on to perfect in his forthcoming films, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors tells the story of Ivan, a humble man descended from generations of pastoralists who have been bound by their traditions, who falls so deeply in love with Marichka. From the outset, sorrow is turned into something positive through the fact that Marichka is the daughter of the man who killed Ivan’s father – somehow, through the trauma comes something positive, a glimmer of hope that demonstrated the evasion of despair, albeit only temporarily. This is soon followed by a happy marriage and sudden tragedy, whereby Marichka is killed while saving an animal that was bound to die had she not attempted to save it. It’s at this point that the theme of sorrow takes over – Parajanov converts the beautiful colour photography into dour, cold black-and-white, which spans the entirety of Ivan’s mourning, reflecting his grieving state. The world is stripped of all colour, and even the most recognizable, comforting landmarks of our cultures tend to fade to grey, becoming painful reminders of the past, harbouring memories of better times.
Yet, in the midst of all of this, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is not a film weighed down by sadness – instead, it becomes yet another creative weapon in Parajanov’s arsenal, with the director fashioning a compelling story of love and loss, and how this is far from a linear process for many individuals. There is no inherent heroism in this film and very little direct conflict. It is a capsule of culture, where the boundaries of reality and fiction are blurred by a director who uses this platform to explore a very different kind of cultural text, one where life is shown as a series of moments that are either joyful or sorrowful – but what persists throughout both is a sense of melancholy, where these characters are working through various quandaries. Some mourn the death of a loved one, others fear the demise of the culture. Parajanov infuses both upbeat humour and ruminative sadness into the film, showing sorrow as not necessarily a regression from society as a result of some traumatic event, but also as a binding force, a necessary sensation that brings this community closer together, causing them to re-evaluate what really matters. The underlying sorrow in his work may not be particularly noticeable on first glance, but if you go deeper into Parajanov’s stories, you find a director who emphasizes the value of carefully-curated sadness in showing the bounds of the human condition, the most simple but effective of his film’s countless admirable qualities.
Hope – The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985)
The idea of hope, which is certainly one of the more abstract concepts discussed here, has never been better articulated than it was in The Legend of Suram Fortress (ამბავი სურამის ციხისა), one of Parajanov’s more distinct works, and one that seems him venturing into the same kind of narrative territory, while still building on his tendency to push his art further than ever before. Taking his cue from a classic Georgian folktale that was passed down through the centuries and remains an important part of the culture, Parajanov explores the resilience of the human spirit by telling the story of a community of Christians trying to defend their territory from the encroaching Muslim invaders that are looking to take over the land – their fortress is their only chance of survival, their main defence, and without a stronghold, they will fall victim to a culture that threatens to eviscerate their own. The central motif of the film is thus the titular fortress, which has been under construction for decades, and right at the moment where it’s about to reach completion, it begins to crumble, necessitating further attempts to build it stronger, with the citizens needing to find new ways to fend off the conquerors, who threaten to not only take their land but dismantle their sacred traditions, taking with them all the principles that come with it. They each hold onto hope that somehow, they will manage to fend off these forces.
The virtue of “hope” has always been considered to be somewhere between faith and expectation, both of which become quite evident throughout this story, whereby the characters seek hope from any source that will bring them the comfort of knowing that they may overcome these challenges. Whether looking towards each other and their leaders, who are also threatened by the fear of having their kingdom dismantled and beliefs destroyed or weaving supernatural traditions into their everyday culture, in the hopes that some celestial being will help them navigate these treacherous circumstances, these characters find hope in different ways – through embracing their faith (or, in the case of one of them, working his way through several different belief systems in the hope of finding comfort and ease with the inevitable), in wealth and splendour, or in their own human resilience, which becomes incredibly clear through the film’s exploration of how desperation and hope are interwoven, and how one cannot exist without the other.
Like many folktales that have persisted through various cultures, The Legend of Suram Fortress employs symbolism quite heavily in its exploration of the central themes. In considering the idea of “hope”, we can focus on how the story itself is built entirely from the idea of the human spirit being tested, with external forces continuing to challenge them. The only aspect that remains consistent and prevents them from crumbling as a society is their intangible, insatiable hope that they will succeed, whatever the sacrifice may be. The film does take a dark turn, and Parajanov certainly doesn’t waver from portraying the downbeat resolution to the story, but it all works towards demonstrating the central theme of hope – whether it be the faithful belief that they will eventually succeed, or that they will be saved from the domineering forces that lurk just out of sight, The Legend of Suram Fortress is a film primarily concerned with demonstrating the value of tenacity and the moment where ethereal yearning becomes reality, no matter the cost. The fact that this comes from a folk tale is itself quite important in exploring the theme of hope since these kinds of stories exist primarily as narratives that generations have looked to for moral assistance and guidance, and were doubtlessly first told as a means to provide direction for past generations to venture into a hostile world, indicating the value of never abandoning the most fundamental quality of hope, regardless of the challenging circumstances that gradually erodes it.
Love – Ashik Kerib (1988)
Ashik Kerib (აშიკ-ქერიბი), completed five years after Parajanov’s final release and only two years before his death, relates the tale of a lowly minstrel’s love for the daughter of a rich man. Spurned due to his poverty, our eponymous hero sets out on an odyssey to gain wealth, enduring heartbreak, war and treachery as he sets out on his seemingly impossible task of returning home before his beloved is free to marry again…
The work of Parajanov may sometimes seem too esoteric to be approached lightly, yet beyond the earthy sensuality that permeates the entirety of his late career, Ashik Kerib eschews almost hints of obscurity to passionately scream out its main theme at the top of its lungs: The joy and agony of romantic love. Yet, Ashik Kerib never feels obvious, or mannered for sake of obscuring a simple story. Instead, it feels boldly allied to its tale of thwarted love, an emotion that knows no nuances or silences. It follows the contours of a folk tale, and the stark storyline is as accessible as it is universal, brought to life by characters who live by the binary of White Hat/Black Hat morality (a motif brought to life quite literally in the costume changes Kerib undergoes through his journey and the various colour coded characters he meets).
To this end, Parajanov’s camera is allied to the overwhelming emotions of his lovers. It moves as they try to navigate their strange surroundings, geography their greatest barrier at one point. It shifts in and out focus and even tilts when emotions are too great to bear, and out of respect and loneliness or grief it will zoom or else pan to a bush out so that we feel their isolation as they do. It is not merely the romantic type of love that can bring sorrow: one of the film’s finest moments occurs when Kerib returns to the home of his mother and sister (whose mourning is dwelt upon in the film as much as Mugal, his lover), only to find it desolate, save for the evil spirits that have now invaded, memorably visualized as horned devils in Parajonov’s patented home-made, folk style of presentation.
The astonishing thing is that the outline of this tale of heartbreak cannot prepare one for the sheer exuberance of its tone: far from a tragedy, the story not only presents the miracles of fairy tales but often adopts the tone of farce, playful anachronism and the omnipresent dancing. Parajanov was a firm believer in bringing extra-cinematic artistic forms to enrich his work, and the most prominent feature he introduces into Ashik Kerib is traditional Azerbaijan folk dancing. It was once said that the classic MGM musicals presented some sort of utopian ideal, the expression of emotions too strong to be told in words. The love that animates Ashik Kerib’s tale is similarly too strong for mere realism, so we turn to dance to be able convey the strange way the whole world appears to move and specifically arrange itself around us when one is desperately in love.
There is another implicit love that is awash in Parajanov’s films, and that is the love of culture. He was a man absolutely enchanted by the cultures of the Soviet satellite countries in grave danger of being erased, and one of his great gifts to us his lingering camera giving immortality to the icons and images that transformed the harsh truths of life gone past into things of beauty. It is not easy to love in this world, but art can transform that harsh truth into something that is happy beyond all the odds. Ashik Kerib performs miracles with his art. Parajanov no less so.
Beauty – The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
To discuss beauty in any film can be difficult at the best of times–it is always dependent on faith in the judgement of the one declaring beauty, and our best efforts to discuss it live or die by how closely we can think through the purely abstract elements that make up this “elusive” beauty. The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը) confounds this problem even further: Its value is almost purely visual, the content exceedingly difficult to parse.
The film depicts the life of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova from infancy to his death. This is nothing like the Hollywood biopic formula: without a foreknowledge of his life, the viewer is lost at sea, and instead of focusing on large events, the film is more interested in bringing strangeness and beauty to the small, everyday events. It brings this beauty by means of visuals tableaus, the camera often facing the subjects head-on. Cuts are hard. Parajanov creates his meaning and magic through contrast, design and composition – if it were not for the rapturous colour or the presence of Armenian folk music, this could be made in the time of Meliés.
In Parajanov’s definition of art, “the Truth” must be transformed into an emotional state. The truths Parajanov presents here are rarely joyous, and death is ever present.
David Thomson once bemoaned cinema’s inability to depict death in a truly spiritual sense, too often resorting to sensationalism. The Color of Pomegranates contains two of the finest, most sensitive depictions of death in cinema. In one of them, the poet’s dead parents are summoned in his memory as if in a passion play, replete with suspended angels and gold leaf. The memory of them, and the almost obscene contrast between the heavenly, “beautiful” depiction of the dead and the cold reality of its cruel separation is brilliantly displayed when a gust of wind blows pure white feathers onto the smiling images of his parents, rendering them pure, and even “pretty”, while it depicts the reality of the pain of our memory marked by the sting of death. Secondly, we come to what must be one of the simplest depictions of war ever committed to celluloid: split almost perfectly in the middle between clear blue sky and green grass, a procession of revellers in brightly coloured clothing gaily toss a golden ball. As they cross the screen, framed by static figures posed as if in a medieval manuscript, a darker clothed figure enters the frame, releases fires a shot from a golden gun. It is clearly a stage prop blowing smoke: but in a flash, chaos ensues, and balance of the image is out of the joint. We next see cuts of men in threatening poses. With barely more than a magical compositional sense, Parajanov set an entire world out of joint.
The film is not a catalogue of horrors: if beauty makes the ultimate horror at least confrontable, it redeems the banalities which sometimes make up most of life. During the childhood reminiscences, the strenuous acts of dyeing and cleaning carpets seems like a strange and adult ritual – and one that crucially increases the colour of the world. Carpets feature in one of the film’s most bizarrely hilarious scenes – a tableau of seduction as village women vamp themselves up while presenting carpets to our protagonist, who due a failed romance has secluded himself in a monastery. The grins and postures reveal that Parajanov’s art encompasses the range of human experience – not merely the suffering.
When faced with an object so singular, perhaps a mere catalogue of descriptions is the only sane response, hoping that somehow the magic of the real thing may be transferred along the way. The movie is not a crossword exercise in symbolism, and it is not merely pretty pictures. Despite the laments of the poems, describing life as suffering, and the bitter parallels between its content and Parajanov’s martyrdom, the feeling is not one of doom but of a world opening. Confronted with such a vision, I can only rely on what my feelings told me. This may be too simple, but in a world where suffering is rampant, beauty must be sought and recorded. Even in the story of a heartbroken monk killed in a war, made by a man hated for his imagination and sent to prison, the beauty and strangeness of life can still be captured. Even if we cannot grasp it, the sweeping life – even with our sufferings – is beautiful.
Ultimately, there isn’t any way to encapsulate everything that makes Parajanov such an enigmatic, brilliant figure. Perhaps the best way to summarize his skill, instead of simply rehashing what we and countless others have said in the past, is to look towards what Jean-Luc Godard, one of the industry’s most steadfast admirers of Parajanov’s work, said when speaking on the subject of the iconoclastic director and his work:
“In the temple of cinema there are images, light and reality. Sergei Parajanov was the master of that temple.”
Parajanov is a filmmaker whose memory is kept alive by those who have admired his work but has still to receive his place in the canon of great cinematic artists, other than by the dedicated but sadly still quite small group of devotees to his work. There has arguably never been a better time to reconsider his position in film history, and while his work continues to be discovered and adored by curious viewers, who undoubtedly end up becoming transfixed by his style and confirming themselves as fans, there is always room for more praise. On this anniversary of his passing, it seems pertinent to remind ourselves of what a great artist Parajanov is, and how no one embodied the spirit of cinema more than he did – beautiful, poetic and absolutely stunning in both form and content, there’s nothing quite like a film put together by one of cinema’s most idiosyncratic, brilliantly unique creative minds.
The Postmodern Pelican 